Do you recall the Bible story about the tower of Babel and how all the people in the world spoke the same language once? Well, it looks like that story may not have been so far fetched. Linguists now believe all human languages originated from a single language. This singular tongue was spoken in East Africaa round 50,000 years ago and, according to a recent research, the language sounded a lot like the way master Yoda from famous Star Wars series speaks.
Courtesy Lucas van Valckenborch & Wikipedia
To be more specific, these linguistic scientists believe that this “proto-human language” used subject- object-verb (SOV) ordering – “I you like”, like Latin (unlike English, which uses SVO ordering, “I like you”.) The findings were published by Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers say that there are few cases when OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO orderings are used.
“This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else,” Ruhlen told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
The researchers created a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world, and discovered that there is a visible connection between all the languages spoken today. For instance, all the Romance languages such as French, Romanian, Spanish, etc. derive from Latin which is part of the Indo-European language family, along with other branches like Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic and more.
“What we found was that the distribution of the six possible word orders did not vary randomly. … Rather, the distribution of these six types was highly structured, and the paths of linguistic change in word order were clear,” Ruhlen said.
Interestingly enough, out of the 2,000 languages analyzed, more than 50% use SOV ordering and those languages that are SVO, OVS and OSV, all derive directly from SOV languages. All languages that are VSO and VOS derive from SVO languages which are also originated from SOV word order, thus making such a language the only viable option to consider when speaking about the first language spoken on Earth.
“We have found that word changes in very precise ways,” Ruhlen added. “But the fact remains that half of the world’s languages still have SOV word order because, inMurray’s and my opinion, they have not changed word order at all. [Our data] shows how word order changes … but it is unpredictable if word order will change, and I really don’t know why.”
This is quite an interesting discovery and one cannot but think of how inspired George Lucas and his screenwriters were when they invented master Yoda.